The twangers may twang and the drummers may bang, but the grace of vintage country blues is timeless and always timely. And it’s been a good time of late
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Photo: Alysse Gafkjen
âYou have to have some charm to play classic country â you have to have respect for your instrument,â says Shannon McNally, who is talking to me on the phone about her new full-length
The Waylon Sessions. The album features songs written and recorded by the great outlaw-country singer Waylon Jennings. Iâm catching up with McNally as sheâs making her way up I-55 out of Jackson, Miss., where sheâs played a show, back home to Nashville by way of Memphis.
I think I get what sheâs telling me about charm. Indeed, McNally found her own way to perform the Jennings songs that make up her latest album. McNally and I trade travel notes about the impossibility of splitting the right angle to save time between Jackson and Nashville, and you can tell she knows the territory. She lived in New Orleans and Mississippi before moving to Nashville in 2017. As I tell her,
28 May 2021
In the liner notes on Shannon McNally’s new record, the singer confessed that she’s had a long fascination with Waylon Jennings‘ music. She wrote, “Just the name ‘Waylon’ makes me sit up in my chair and look around like I might see an apparition or a buffalo standing in the living room…. I have always loved his defiantly existential but immediately accessible common man’s music and how it boogies.” That’s an odd way to describe the man and his music, but her reverence is clear.
While McNally had performed and recorded a few of Jennings’ songs in the past, she said she felt intimidated by his immense talent, which prevented her from covering his work more often. However, she jumped right in when the opportunity arose for her to make an album of nothing but Jennings’ tunes. Waylon had a long recording career that dated back to the 1950s and extended until the 21st century with 45 studio albums and almost 100 singles, including 16 number one hits. C
Article Contributed by IVPR | Published on Saturday, April 17, 2021
“I have always loved his defiantly existential but immediately accessible common man’s music and how it boogies,” says
Shannon McNally of the man whose timeless music is the subject of her new album THE WAYLON SESSIONS, Waylon Jennings. Upon the album’s completion, McNally’s collection of tunes ended up being not so much a tribute as it is a recontextualization; a nuanced, feminine rendering of a catalog long considered a bastion of hetero-masculinity. “The world has changed a lot since these songs were first recorded,” says McNally. “I have never heard a woman sing any of them, but these tunes are poignant and relevant to me and to women in general right now.”